Search form

Articles

It's not that long ago that all you needed to run an airline was a few planes and some competent pilots. But now, with more of us zipping around the globe every year and the advent of no frills airlines, keeping an airline competitive has become a complicated business. Christine Currie explains how your airfare is calculated.

Kurt Gödel, who would have celebrated his 100th birthday next year, showed in 1931 that the power of maths to explain the world is limited: his famous incompleteness theorem proves mathematically that maths cannot prove everything. Gregory Chaitin explains why he thinks that Gödel's incompleteness theorem is only the tip of the iceberg, and why mathematics is far too complex ever to be
described by a single theory.

Physicist and cosmologist Paul Davies has made an unusual move into the infant discipline of astrobiology. He tells Plus about his interest in the big questions: what is life, how would we recognise aliens - and are they all around us?

Saying that someone is a chaotic thinker might seem like an insult - but, according to Lewis Dartnell, it could be that the mathematical phenomenon of chaos is a crucial part of what makes our brains work.